Frankly, if anybody started doing it, nobody is going to give them a hard time about it.
What, is BP going to say "hey wait, that's our oil - dump that back in the ocean where you found it!?"
Unless the price is REALLY low I doubt it would pay off. This is crude oil, and it literally is pumped out of big holes in the ground normally. It will be hard for anybody skimming it off the ocean to be competitive. Indeed, they might burn more oil cruising around skimming it up. For this reason, I suspect that BP is more likely to thank anybody who tries to make a buck in this way. The $1M in lost sales is worth 1000x that in PR right now - they're probably spending that much every day trying to contain the spill.
Ok, suppose they upgrade their backbone connectivity to 1200Mb/s in your example.
You propose that their customers be FORBIDDEN from downloading data at 150Mb/s since the network MUST be provisioned to sustain peak capacity 100% of the time.
99% of all internet use cases involve short times of peak usage, with long periods of low usage.
So, why can't companies sell a plan that fits this bill?
Now, I'm fine with banning the word "unlimited" if there are limits. That's just truth in advertising. What I'm not fine with is forcing all plans to be unlimited.
Given the choice of unlimited total volume at 512kbps, or peak use at 30Mbps with a download cap of 100GB per month (or some kind of defined-in-advance throttling at that point), I'm going to tend to choose the latter, even though the former gives me 50% more bytes per month. If I were capped at 150GB/month then it would be a win/win to choose the "limited" plan - as my cap is the same as the most I could get from the lower-peak-bandwidth plan, but I have the option of either throttling myself or surging at peak rate.
Perhaps you'd be happy if the ISP-provided modem had a checkbox that would throttle you to a level that you could download at 24*7 without any ISP complaints? Then your plan could be advertised as a 30MBps plan with a 100GB cap, or true unlimited use at 300kbps.
The problem is that no matter how big you make the upstream connection, you are going to inefficiently allocate it if you assume 100% usage by ALL customers. What you propose is that rather than just throttling the 0.01% of people who use their connection 24*7 that the ISP throttles everybody just to be fair.
It sounds like you want to take the existing internet business market, fracture it, keep the resulting pieces in separate silos, and award a monopoly on land lines to the telco industry (what about cable?).
Well, the telco and cable ALREADY have monopolies. I just want to split the last mile from the ISP business. You're not suggesting that you actually have a choice of either telcos or cable companies.
However, what you've just said flies in the face of what the original article is asking for - one bill to pay, one throat to choke, one entity to deal with. Simplicity.
Sometimes the best way to do things isn't the simplest. Why should I have to pay extra just so that you can get free unlimited satellite internet service anywhere on the earth when I have no need to travel outside of populated areas? Why should somebody who just wants to check email have to pay for somebody who downloads torrents over the 3G cell network?
As a matter of fact, I'd say that the future of last-mile internet connectivity is going to be mostly wireless, much like the present day state of the art in telephony.
Depends - if you're talking about checking email or basic web browsing - maybe. If you're talking about streaming HDTV or whatever the next big craze is - probably not. I've got something like 30Mbps on my land line - only a few wireless technologies can even approach that and certainly not in a shared network.
Well, it isn't perfect, but it's a hell of a lot better than the US had under AT&T's regulated telephone monopoly.
Uh, you say that as if your local phone company wasn't regulated. The only thing that was deregulated (somewhat) was long distance service.
In fact, what was done to AT&T is basically what I want to see happen to the last mile. In the POTS system the last mile is a natural monopoly, but long-distance isn't. So, they split up phone companies into local and long-distance providers and deregulated the latter. I want the same thing. Split up the last-mile connection providers from the ISPs.
When you do this, then you aren't stuck with slow access to Youtube because your cable company wants to promote some other website, or whatever. You don't get much choice in your last-mile provider, so that should be regulated so that consumers don't get burned. You do get choice in your ISP, so those should be deregulated.
Competition is tough to foster in a wired last-mile scenario, but easier to get going in a wireless environment. Hence part of the reason I think the question of last-mile wires will be mostly moot in about 10 years.
You'll always need regulation in wireless, since spectrum is a scarce commodity. However, I do agree with what you are getting at - last-mile is a much smaller problem with wireless.
However, I don't see last-mile wires going away anytime soon - if anything demand will increase. Once HDTV over internet becomes mainstream you are going to see people's bandwidth use explode. It is going to be extremely hard for wireless to compete with copper, let alone fiber.
I don't want ISP data rates to resemble cell phone sms rates...
Now, I'm completely fine with market internet rates, if the last mile rates are regulated.
That is, you pay your phone company to get your data to the central office, and then you pay a different company to get that data to the internet. The last mile fee structure would be based purely on the technology - so DSL would be flat rate, cable might be use-based, etc. The last mile provider would be prohibited from offering ISP service.
Competition doesn't really work well for the last mile, which is why we have the mess we currently have.
Here is where your argument fails - how much capacity should BT have in the first place?
If people use lots of bandwidth, then they get saturated, and then people browsing the web get annoyed at page load rates.
So, they add more capacity. However, since there is no per-kb rate/etc on usage people just up their demand for bandwidth accordingly, so they're instantly at 100% capacity again.
So, then you get into fights over what is and isn't network abuse and all that. ISPs try to filter torrents and all that nonsense, then that leads to encryption and a war of escalation in technology. It doesn't really resolve the problem.
Instead, if you just charge a reasonable amount per gigabyte then usage is self-regulated. If you want to seed torrents all day, have at it. BT will even run dedicated fiber to your house if that is what it takes to keep you going. However, you'll pay for it, and if the price is worth it to you then by all means go.
Unlimited plans usually translate into people who barely use the service paying for those who heavily use it.
The key is to regulate so that telecoms end up charging reasonable usage rates. Maybe force them to charge the same rates for corporate and home users - no way they'll try to charge fortune 500 companies crazy rates...
I dunno - when I look up speed on wikipedia about the first definition I spot is a definition of instantaneous velocity as a derivative.
I'm also not certain that measurements of speed depend on granularity of time at all, but I'd have to confirm that with somebody who knows a bit more about quantum mechanics.
Suppose an electron changes state and emits a photon. That photon will have a doppler shift based on the velocity of the electron relative to an observer. I don't think that the emission of a photon takes time - the energy of the electron and the photon is quantized - at one moment of time there is no photon, and at another moment there is a photon with a given wavelength. So, when you measure the wavelength of that photon, you're getting an instantaneous measure of speed.
Of course, in practice you're going to measure lots of photons, which creates an interval, but it really is just an average of many instantaneous velocity measurements.
I'm open to clarification from somebody with knowledge of such things.
On a final note - in my brief search I couldn't actually find an authoritative definition for speed anywhere. Sure, we all "know" what it is, but we're arguing technicalities, and doing so requires agreement on a precise definition in the first place. Lots of concepts in physics are defined by differentials, such as entropy (dS = dq(rev)/T).
Yeah, do you think that they would put that in the record? Judges can ask the clerk explicitly to strike things from the record, and when they do that there is no evidence that they ever happened.
Hey, I'm with you 100%, but good luck. About the only thing more corrupt than the rulers in Washington are the rulers in your local town council...
You can't MEASURE instantaneous speed, however it does exist. It can also be measured with arbitrary precision (if you're willing to tolerate arbitrary error in position).
I'd consider velocity a state variable. Sure, it can only be measured relative to something else, but at any moment it has a value.
You could consider the speed of an object the distance it would travel upon in a given amount of time absent any forces, even if other forces are not absent, and even if you're considering an instant in time.
I can also tell you what the speed of light in a vacuum is, even though I'm sitting in a room with breathable air.
Physics experts are welcome to comment, but I'd prefer some kind of authoritative citation. What you're suggesting just doesn't make sense.
Depends - you can leverage the cloud without being dependent on it.
If you store your life on gmail, be sure to have a complete IMAP backup someplace. If you host your website on a provider, be sure you have everything you need to rapidly redeploy it elsewhere and make sure you own the domain and DNS/etc.
Go ahead and leverage the cloud, but be able to pick up and move at the drop of a hat.
Now, if downtime is super-precious then I'd probably go with a better-supported option. However, the reality is that most clouds provide better service than most individuals can provision themselves with. There are other reasons to go it alone, but reliability usually isn't one of them.
True - plus with loser pays the industry is going to be very careful about filing lawsuits left and right. Maybe if they manage to start winning a few at a time consistently they might go to that tactic.
In the US just being named in a lawsuit is going to result in penalties that are effectively bigger than what you'd get for most non-felony crimes. The verdict is just the final life-ruining blow - from day one you're paying more in legal costs per day than the fines associated with all but the most heinous crimes. Innocent or guilty - in the end it is just how much debt you end up in.
Surveying academic scientists and calling it representative of scientists in general is also a VERY big assumption. Lots of scientists work in industry. Also, I'm not sure what the breakdown was by institution size - lots of scientists work at smaller institutions that don't make most of their money off of NSF grants/etc.
I suspect that in those two categories you'd find a much larger percentage of scientists with religious views. I work around hundreds of scientists and in general I'd consider them pretty mainstream from a religious/cultural standpoint, which means a LOT more theists than in this survey.
I suspect that academic culture is a bit of a self-selective group. People with strong religious views might tend to avoid it, or might be less likely to stay there. Maybe it is because they "can't cut it" or maybe it is just because their peers don't like them. It is hard to figure out what is the cause and what is the effect.
Well, how it gets paid for is up to the government. The government needs to consider that the only reason Intel built a plant there is that it was a lot cheaper than doing it elsewhere. If the government starts telling them to pay a lot more for resources and that they can't just dump their solvents into the creek then they might just find some other place to go.
If the company wanted good stable infrastructure they'd have just built the plant in the US or Europe. If you build your job market on exploiting your own populace, then you're stuck with that until there is some other compelling reason to build a market there.
Are you factoring in the fact that water for agriculture doesn't need to be cleaned up to the same level as water for human consumption? I'm sure the plants can handle a small amount of salt, but people don't like tastes in their drinking water.
Given the choice between starvation, thirst, and deregulation, quite a bit could probably be done to make nuclear less expensive as well. Solar may also be an option, since solar and desalination tend to be geographically coupled.
Agreed. What's wrong with a $200 fine like you have with speeding? It isn't like people go flying down the streets at 200mph with impunity since they don't mind paying the fines 3 times a week. Really, even just a slap on the wrist will tend to moderate bad behavior when you're talking about stuff that isn't all that serious.
Suppose a 15-year-old downloads some songs - either they or their parents are at risk of a seriously damaged life (and I mean effects that will last decades even with bankruptcy "protection" / etc). If a 15-year-old stabs somebody with a knife the penalties are FAR less onerous. The parents won't be prosecuted at all, and the child will be tried as a minor and will have an expunged record in many jurisdictions. If the kid turns himself around he could still have a fairly normal life. A 15-year-old who commits homicide might end up in worse shape, although I suspect a 15-year-old rapist could do better. We're effectively placing teenagers downloading music in the same category as aggravated assault, rape, and murder. I looked up somebody I knew who was convicted (as an adult) of simple assault and associated minor crimes (first time conviction) and they paid $4k and a year's probation.
Well, while I agree with your overall points and philosophy, there are a few things that DPI could do to make things really annoying for ISP customers:
1. They can probably detect http headers that have a GET line that includes a filename of something that seems to be infringing. Better not view any websites with photos of artists named "Mariah Carey - singing Name-That-Song.jpg" on them... Or, if you're going to post mp3s on a website maybe you should rename them to.jpg files once they start filtering those out...
2. They could detect http response headers that have a mime type the record industry doesn't like, such as a torrent file or mp3.
3. They could detect non-encrypted torrent traffic, or non-encrypted mp3s/etc in general. Assembling the packets would be hard, knowing they're being sent is probably not.
4. When "suspicious" traffic like any of the above is detected, they could probably start logging full packets and assemble full streams for further analysis - if you only do that on a small percentage of traffic and don't keep the captured packets around forever it may be practical.
Sure, all of the above will probably hassle lots of people who do nothing illegal, but I don't think the recording industry really cares about that. Don't want to prove your innocence? Well, just don't use bittorrent. Oh, we're not banning it - anybody can keep using it as long as they don't mind proving their innocence in court every six months (make no mistake, in the end the burden of proof will end up on the defendant since the industry will have some nebulous report output that has their name on a list).
As far as not being able to catch all of it - I don't know that they really care. If the ISPs give the music industry 1000 people to sue every year, or 1000 people who they can ban from the internet every year, that would be a victory for them. Once people are afraid to click on links lest they accidentally go to a "bad site" and end up with a ruined life then they will be happy. That's why I pretty-much don't browse the internet from work - with the laws in the US as they are all it takes is one misclick or typo and a zealous log monitor and you can be in VERY deep water.
There is a reason that windows doesn't display anything at all on a locked screen but the unlock message, and why it doesn't automount media/usb/etc while locked. This is a potential security hole.
Granted, putting sensitive data on a device that is small and lightweight is already a bigger security issue, so unless they're going to implement some kind of full-flash encryption scheme with a boot password the lock screen is the least of their worries. Forget remote wipe/etc - if I really want to steal data on a smartphone I'd just yank the battery before it got wiped, and then extract the data right from the flash chips or via JTAG.
A big issue for device security would be the password complexity - full-storage encryption is only as good as key size, and there is no way somebody is going to type a strong password into a phone. Your next best bet is to use the cloud - user enters a PIN on the phone, phone transmits PIN to the cloud, if correct cloud sends key back to the phone - which prevents brute force attacks and allows for revocation. Of course, now you have to trust your life to the cloud and your phone will never boot offline (which means mandatory data roaming when you travel unless the phone has a dumbed-down feature phone mode of some kind that doesn't need the key).
Why not take a page from the Sony Clie and put a scroll wheel on the side? I'm not sure I want to give up screen real-estate for this (though maybe a tablet could afford it). Why sacrifice space on a state-of-the-art OLED screen that has 200 pixels in the width of your index finger, when a 10 cent potentiometer will do the same job?
But given that you don't have to bring the reaction mass for the scramjet with you, it might be more efficient than a rocket of the same mass.
It isn't just reaction mass - it is the oxidizer. 2g H2+ 16g O2 -> 18g H2O. In a rocket you carry that 18g of H2+O2 with you. In a scramjet you only carry the 2g of H2, and you use atmospheric O2.
That's a different argument - which is self-consistent...
However, judging by the prevailing opinions, I don't think you can call it mental illness unless you're willing to define illness as the state of being completely normal.
You might be able to argue foolish - depending on your definition of "foolish."
Because God gave us a brain that's prone to delusions, hallucinations, and deception of the self and others, it's reasonable for us to demand that he appear personally to each and every one of us he'd like to address.
Why? Is it reasonable for every climate change denier on the planet to expect a council of scientists to sit down and walk them through the evidence and entertain a debate on its merits? Why should I believe what the newspapers tell me, since for all I know the scientist they're interviewing it got it all wrong?
Perhaps a god exists who does not have the motivations you ascribe to him?
In any case, this is a fairly moot argument. Nobody can prove or disprove the existence of a god via observations and hypotheses unless that god decides to reveal himself. Science and religion are two different philosophies that do not generally follow each other's rules...:)
Your argument was that if you did create a planet and then left it alone that you'd be disappointed if they started believing in God. However, nobody that I know of believes in a God who never intervened in the world. Perhaps most of the people you are criticizing might feel the same way if they had created a world and left it alone and people started to believe in a God when there was no revelation of one in the first place.
So, your argument is a straw man - it bases your opponent's arguments on something that your opponents don't claim: that they believe in a God despite God never interacting with the world.
Now, if your argument was that you'd be disappointed if you dropped in and had a conversation with somebody, and then 1000 years later people are still making up stories about you, then you'd have an analogy consistent with your opponents' positions. However, I don't see how your argument gets you very far given that you did in fact mess with the world.
This isn't exactly the easiest thing to put into text... Try this - step back and ask yourself what is the metaphor you're creating - what relates to what. I think you'll find that it is not self-consistent.
Perhaps those "2" factors are instead simply the result of human nature? Which is the cause and which is the effect?
Think about it: Suppose you're a caveman and the last 10 times a lion jumped out of the bushes at you, your response was to dive to the right, roll over, and jab it with your spear as it tries to leap on top of you. You survived all ten times, although half your tribe has been eaten by lions. Then some smart guy walks over and says that he things you should try diving to your left, or taking off your shoes, or whatever. Chances are the guys who lived are the guys who kept doing something that happened to work well. Of course, there is also some value to learning, so human nature also has some adaptability as well. The bottom line, however, is that if something works well everybody tends to stick with it.
The same problems happen to scientists all the time - how many cling to their pet theories long after everybody else has moved on? Some of the people who do this end up being right, and most end up being wrong. The guy who goes to church every Sunday morning fundamentally isn't all that different from you - he just started out differently or ended up on a different track.
Well, the problem with your argument is that most religions maintain that God did come down and explain himself, or something along those lines. He just doesn't do it every other Tuesday.
Science is just a systematic way of coming up with models that predict experimental outcomes - nothing more and nothing less. It is incredibly useful, but it is tied to observations, and not facts (whatever those are).
Well, drugs get around it by charging enormous fees, and since life is at stake people are willing to pay them (grudgingly). I doubt people will pay as much for an ear of corn as they do for a bottle of Viagara.
Hey, I'm open to other options, but what you're proposing basically seems like a ban on modified foods. You can feed people all the toadstools you want, as long as they're natural, but heaven forbid you try to make a low-fat mayo that tastes good.
Which is why every so called 'fact' should be accompanied with a degree of probability, even if it's very rough.
Exactly - just look at how well that worked on Wall Street. Hey, that derivative has a 99.999999% chance of going up but 384%, and only a measly 0.000001% chance of losing 75%, so there is no chance that if we have 80 bazillion shares of 40,000 derivatives like this that we'll actually lose anything, right?
Or we could use the example of the space shuttle, which had a well-engineered set of parts that together only had a 1 in 10,000 chance of serious failure.
Numbers are only as good as the underlying model. Testing a model seems NP hard to me. The only way to know the shuttle failure rate is to launch it 100 times and see how many astronauts die. The only way to REALLY know the probability of the big bang being right is to create 10,000 model universes from the same (unknown) starting conditions as ours and see what conclusions the scientists who evolve in every one of them independently come up with.
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Frankly, if anybody started doing it, nobody is going to give them a hard time about it.
What, is BP going to say "hey wait, that's our oil - dump that back in the ocean where you found it!?"
Unless the price is REALLY low I doubt it would pay off. This is crude oil, and it literally is pumped out of big holes in the ground normally. It will be hard for anybody skimming it off the ocean to be competitive. Indeed, they might burn more oil cruising around skimming it up. For this reason, I suspect that BP is more likely to thank anybody who tries to make a buck in this way. The $1M in lost sales is worth 1000x that in PR right now - they're probably spending that much every day trying to contain the spill.
Ok, suppose they upgrade their backbone connectivity to 1200Mb/s in your example.
You propose that their customers be FORBIDDEN from downloading data at 150Mb/s since the network MUST be provisioned to sustain peak capacity 100% of the time.
99% of all internet use cases involve short times of peak usage, with long periods of low usage.
So, why can't companies sell a plan that fits this bill?
Now, I'm fine with banning the word "unlimited" if there are limits. That's just truth in advertising. What I'm not fine with is forcing all plans to be unlimited.
Given the choice of unlimited total volume at 512kbps, or peak use at 30Mbps with a download cap of 100GB per month (or some kind of defined-in-advance throttling at that point), I'm going to tend to choose the latter, even though the former gives me 50% more bytes per month. If I were capped at 150GB/month then it would be a win/win to choose the "limited" plan - as my cap is the same as the most I could get from the lower-peak-bandwidth plan, but I have the option of either throttling myself or surging at peak rate.
Perhaps you'd be happy if the ISP-provided modem had a checkbox that would throttle you to a level that you could download at 24*7 without any ISP complaints? Then your plan could be advertised as a 30MBps plan with a 100GB cap, or true unlimited use at 300kbps.
The problem is that no matter how big you make the upstream connection, you are going to inefficiently allocate it if you assume 100% usage by ALL customers. What you propose is that rather than just throttling the 0.01% of people who use their connection 24*7 that the ISP throttles everybody just to be fair.
It sounds like you want to take the existing internet business market, fracture it, keep the resulting pieces in separate silos, and award a monopoly on land lines to the telco industry (what about cable?).
Well, the telco and cable ALREADY have monopolies. I just want to split the last mile from the ISP business. You're not suggesting that you actually have a choice of either telcos or cable companies.
However, what you've just said flies in the face of what the original article is asking for - one bill to pay, one throat to choke, one entity to deal with. Simplicity.
Sometimes the best way to do things isn't the simplest. Why should I have to pay extra just so that you can get free unlimited satellite internet service anywhere on the earth when I have no need to travel outside of populated areas? Why should somebody who just wants to check email have to pay for somebody who downloads torrents over the 3G cell network?
As a matter of fact, I'd say that the future of last-mile internet connectivity is going to be mostly wireless, much like the present day state of the art in telephony.
Depends - if you're talking about checking email or basic web browsing - maybe. If you're talking about streaming HDTV or whatever the next big craze is - probably not. I've got something like 30Mbps on my land line - only a few wireless technologies can even approach that and certainly not in a shared network.
Well, it isn't perfect, but it's a hell of a lot better than the US had under AT&T's regulated telephone monopoly.
Uh, you say that as if your local phone company wasn't regulated. The only thing that was deregulated (somewhat) was long distance service.
In fact, what was done to AT&T is basically what I want to see happen to the last mile. In the POTS system the last mile is a natural monopoly, but long-distance isn't. So, they split up phone companies into local and long-distance providers and deregulated the latter. I want the same thing. Split up the last-mile connection providers from the ISPs.
When you do this, then you aren't stuck with slow access to Youtube because your cable company wants to promote some other website, or whatever. You don't get much choice in your last-mile provider, so that should be regulated so that consumers don't get burned. You do get choice in your ISP, so those should be deregulated.
Competition is tough to foster in a wired last-mile scenario, but easier to get going in a wireless environment. Hence part of the reason I think the question of last-mile wires will be mostly moot in about 10 years.
You'll always need regulation in wireless, since spectrum is a scarce commodity. However, I do agree with what you are getting at - last-mile is a much smaller problem with wireless.
However, I don't see last-mile wires going away anytime soon - if anything demand will increase. Once HDTV over internet becomes mainstream you are going to see people's bandwidth use explode. It is going to be extremely hard for wireless to compete with copper, let alone fiber.
Simple - telecom is a natural monopoly.
I don't want ISP data rates to resemble cell phone sms rates...
Now, I'm completely fine with market internet rates, if the last mile rates are regulated.
That is, you pay your phone company to get your data to the central office, and then you pay a different company to get that data to the internet. The last mile fee structure would be based purely on the technology - so DSL would be flat rate, cable might be use-based, etc. The last mile provider would be prohibited from offering ISP service.
Competition doesn't really work well for the last mile, which is why we have the mess we currently have.
Here is where your argument fails - how much capacity should BT have in the first place?
If people use lots of bandwidth, then they get saturated, and then people browsing the web get annoyed at page load rates.
So, they add more capacity. However, since there is no per-kb rate/etc on usage people just up their demand for bandwidth accordingly, so they're instantly at 100% capacity again.
So, then you get into fights over what is and isn't network abuse and all that. ISPs try to filter torrents and all that nonsense, then that leads to encryption and a war of escalation in technology. It doesn't really resolve the problem.
Instead, if you just charge a reasonable amount per gigabyte then usage is self-regulated. If you want to seed torrents all day, have at it. BT will even run dedicated fiber to your house if that is what it takes to keep you going. However, you'll pay for it, and if the price is worth it to you then by all means go.
Unlimited plans usually translate into people who barely use the service paying for those who heavily use it.
The key is to regulate so that telecoms end up charging reasonable usage rates. Maybe force them to charge the same rates for corporate and home users - no way they'll try to charge fortune 500 companies crazy rates...
I dunno - when I look up speed on wikipedia about the first definition I spot is a definition of instantaneous velocity as a derivative.
I'm also not certain that measurements of speed depend on granularity of time at all, but I'd have to confirm that with somebody who knows a bit more about quantum mechanics.
Suppose an electron changes state and emits a photon. That photon will have a doppler shift based on the velocity of the electron relative to an observer. I don't think that the emission of a photon takes time - the energy of the electron and the photon is quantized - at one moment of time there is no photon, and at another moment there is a photon with a given wavelength. So, when you measure the wavelength of that photon, you're getting an instantaneous measure of speed.
Of course, in practice you're going to measure lots of photons, which creates an interval, but it really is just an average of many instantaneous velocity measurements.
I'm open to clarification from somebody with knowledge of such things.
On a final note - in my brief search I couldn't actually find an authoritative definition for speed anywhere. Sure, we all "know" what it is, but we're arguing technicalities, and doing so requires agreement on a precise definition in the first place. Lots of concepts in physics are defined by differentials, such as entropy (dS = dq(rev)/T).
Yeah, do you think that they would put that in the record? Judges can ask the clerk explicitly to strike things from the record, and when they do that there is no evidence that they ever happened.
Hey, I'm with you 100%, but good luck. About the only thing more corrupt than the rulers in Washington are the rulers in your local town council...
Sorry - I have to disagree with you here.
You can't MEASURE instantaneous speed, however it does exist. It can also be measured with arbitrary precision (if you're willing to tolerate arbitrary error in position).
I'd consider velocity a state variable. Sure, it can only be measured relative to something else, but at any moment it has a value.
You could consider the speed of an object the distance it would travel upon in a given amount of time absent any forces, even if other forces are not absent, and even if you're considering an instant in time.
I can also tell you what the speed of light in a vacuum is, even though I'm sitting in a room with breathable air.
Physics experts are welcome to comment, but I'd prefer some kind of authoritative citation. What you're suggesting just doesn't make sense.
Depends - you can leverage the cloud without being dependent on it.
If you store your life on gmail, be sure to have a complete IMAP backup someplace. If you host your website on a provider, be sure you have everything you need to rapidly redeploy it elsewhere and make sure you own the domain and DNS/etc.
Go ahead and leverage the cloud, but be able to pick up and move at the drop of a hat.
Now, if downtime is super-precious then I'd probably go with a better-supported option. However, the reality is that most clouds provide better service than most individuals can provision themselves with. There are other reasons to go it alone, but reliability usually isn't one of them.
True - plus with loser pays the industry is going to be very careful about filing lawsuits left and right. Maybe if they manage to start winning a few at a time consistently they might go to that tactic.
In the US just being named in a lawsuit is going to result in penalties that are effectively bigger than what you'd get for most non-felony crimes. The verdict is just the final life-ruining blow - from day one you're paying more in legal costs per day than the fines associated with all but the most heinous crimes. Innocent or guilty - in the end it is just how much debt you end up in.
Surveying academic scientists and calling it representative of scientists in general is also a VERY big assumption. Lots of scientists work in industry. Also, I'm not sure what the breakdown was by institution size - lots of scientists work at smaller institutions that don't make most of their money off of NSF grants/etc.
I suspect that in those two categories you'd find a much larger percentage of scientists with religious views. I work around hundreds of scientists and in general I'd consider them pretty mainstream from a religious/cultural standpoint, which means a LOT more theists than in this survey.
I suspect that academic culture is a bit of a self-selective group. People with strong religious views might tend to avoid it, or might be less likely to stay there. Maybe it is because they "can't cut it" or maybe it is just because their peers don't like them. It is hard to figure out what is the cause and what is the effect.
Well, how it gets paid for is up to the government. The government needs to consider that the only reason Intel built a plant there is that it was a lot cheaper than doing it elsewhere. If the government starts telling them to pay a lot more for resources and that they can't just dump their solvents into the creek then they might just find some other place to go.
If the company wanted good stable infrastructure they'd have just built the plant in the US or Europe. If you build your job market on exploiting your own populace, then you're stuck with that until there is some other compelling reason to build a market there.
Are you factoring in the fact that water for agriculture doesn't need to be cleaned up to the same level as water for human consumption? I'm sure the plants can handle a small amount of salt, but people don't like tastes in their drinking water.
Given the choice between starvation, thirst, and deregulation, quite a bit could probably be done to make nuclear less expensive as well. Solar may also be an option, since solar and desalination tend to be geographically coupled.
Agreed. What's wrong with a $200 fine like you have with speeding? It isn't like people go flying down the streets at 200mph with impunity since they don't mind paying the fines 3 times a week. Really, even just a slap on the wrist will tend to moderate bad behavior when you're talking about stuff that isn't all that serious.
Suppose a 15-year-old downloads some songs - either they or their parents are at risk of a seriously damaged life (and I mean effects that will last decades even with bankruptcy "protection" / etc). If a 15-year-old stabs somebody with a knife the penalties are FAR less onerous. The parents won't be prosecuted at all, and the child will be tried as a minor and will have an expunged record in many jurisdictions. If the kid turns himself around he could still have a fairly normal life. A 15-year-old who commits homicide might end up in worse shape, although I suspect a 15-year-old rapist could do better. We're effectively placing teenagers downloading music in the same category as aggravated assault, rape, and murder. I looked up somebody I knew who was convicted (as an adult) of simple assault and associated minor crimes (first time conviction) and they paid $4k and a year's probation.
Well, while I agree with your overall points and philosophy, there are a few things that DPI could do to make things really annoying for ISP customers:
1. They can probably detect http headers that have a GET line that includes a filename of something that seems to be infringing. Better not view any websites with photos of artists named "Mariah Carey - singing Name-That-Song.jpg" on them... Or, if you're going to post mp3s on a website maybe you should rename them to .jpg files once they start filtering those out...
2. They could detect http response headers that have a mime type the record industry doesn't like, such as a torrent file or mp3.
3. They could detect non-encrypted torrent traffic, or non-encrypted mp3s/etc in general. Assembling the packets would be hard, knowing they're being sent is probably not.
4. When "suspicious" traffic like any of the above is detected, they could probably start logging full packets and assemble full streams for further analysis - if you only do that on a small percentage of traffic and don't keep the captured packets around forever it may be practical.
Sure, all of the above will probably hassle lots of people who do nothing illegal, but I don't think the recording industry really cares about that. Don't want to prove your innocence? Well, just don't use bittorrent. Oh, we're not banning it - anybody can keep using it as long as they don't mind proving their innocence in court every six months (make no mistake, in the end the burden of proof will end up on the defendant since the industry will have some nebulous report output that has their name on a list).
As far as not being able to catch all of it - I don't know that they really care. If the ISPs give the music industry 1000 people to sue every year, or 1000 people who they can ban from the internet every year, that would be a victory for them. Once people are afraid to click on links lest they accidentally go to a "bad site" and end up with a ruined life then they will be happy. That's why I pretty-much don't browse the internet from work - with the laws in the US as they are all it takes is one misclick or typo and a zealous log monitor and you can be in VERY deep water.
It does need to be a choice though.
There is a reason that windows doesn't display anything at all on a locked screen but the unlock message, and why it doesn't automount media/usb/etc while locked. This is a potential security hole.
Granted, putting sensitive data on a device that is small and lightweight is already a bigger security issue, so unless they're going to implement some kind of full-flash encryption scheme with a boot password the lock screen is the least of their worries. Forget remote wipe/etc - if I really want to steal data on a smartphone I'd just yank the battery before it got wiped, and then extract the data right from the flash chips or via JTAG.
A big issue for device security would be the password complexity - full-storage encryption is only as good as key size, and there is no way somebody is going to type a strong password into a phone. Your next best bet is to use the cloud - user enters a PIN on the phone, phone transmits PIN to the cloud, if correct cloud sends key back to the phone - which prevents brute force attacks and allows for revocation. Of course, now you have to trust your life to the cloud and your phone will never boot offline (which means mandatory data roaming when you travel unless the phone has a dumbed-down feature phone mode of some kind that doesn't need the key).
Why not take a page from the Sony Clie and put a scroll wheel on the side? I'm not sure I want to give up screen real-estate for this (though maybe a tablet could afford it). Why sacrifice space on a state-of-the-art OLED screen that has 200 pixels in the width of your index finger, when a 10 cent potentiometer will do the same job?
But given that you don't have to bring the reaction mass for the scramjet with you, it might be more efficient than a rocket of the same mass.
It isn't just reaction mass - it is the oxidizer. 2g H2+ 16g O2 -> 18g H2O. In a rocket you carry that 18g of H2+O2 with you. In a scramjet you only carry the 2g of H2, and you use atmospheric O2.
That's a different argument - which is self-consistent...
However, judging by the prevailing opinions, I don't think you can call it mental illness unless you're willing to define illness as the state of being completely normal.
You might be able to argue foolish - depending on your definition of "foolish."
Sorry to reply twice but:
Because God gave us a brain that's prone to delusions, hallucinations, and deception of the self and others, it's reasonable for us to demand that he appear personally to each and every one of us he'd like to address.
Why? Is it reasonable for every climate change denier on the planet to expect a council of scientists to sit down and walk them through the evidence and entertain a debate on its merits? Why should I believe what the newspapers tell me, since for all I know the scientist they're interviewing it got it all wrong?
Perhaps a god exists who does not have the motivations you ascribe to him?
In any case, this is a fairly moot argument. Nobody can prove or disprove the existence of a god via observations and hypotheses unless that god decides to reveal himself. Science and religion are two different philosophies that do not generally follow each other's rules... :)
Your argument was that if you did create a planet and then left it alone that you'd be disappointed if they started believing in God. However, nobody that I know of believes in a God who never intervened in the world. Perhaps most of the people you are criticizing might feel the same way if they had created a world and left it alone and people started to believe in a God when there was no revelation of one in the first place.
So, your argument is a straw man - it bases your opponent's arguments on something that your opponents don't claim: that they believe in a God despite God never interacting with the world.
Now, if your argument was that you'd be disappointed if you dropped in and had a conversation with somebody, and then 1000 years later people are still making up stories about you, then you'd have an analogy consistent with your opponents' positions. However, I don't see how your argument gets you very far given that you did in fact mess with the world.
This isn't exactly the easiest thing to put into text... Try this - step back and ask yourself what is the metaphor you're creating - what relates to what. I think you'll find that it is not self-consistent.
Perhaps those "2" factors are instead simply the result of human nature? Which is the cause and which is the effect?
Think about it: Suppose you're a caveman and the last 10 times a lion jumped out of the bushes at you, your response was to dive to the right, roll over, and jab it with your spear as it tries to leap on top of you. You survived all ten times, although half your tribe has been eaten by lions. Then some smart guy walks over and says that he things you should try diving to your left, or taking off your shoes, or whatever. Chances are the guys who lived are the guys who kept doing something that happened to work well. Of course, there is also some value to learning, so human nature also has some adaptability as well. The bottom line, however, is that if something works well everybody tends to stick with it.
The same problems happen to scientists all the time - how many cling to their pet theories long after everybody else has moved on? Some of the people who do this end up being right, and most end up being wrong. The guy who goes to church every Sunday morning fundamentally isn't all that different from you - he just started out differently or ended up on a different track.
Well, the problem with your argument is that most religions maintain that God did come down and explain himself, or something along those lines. He just doesn't do it every other Tuesday.
Science is just a systematic way of coming up with models that predict experimental outcomes - nothing more and nothing less. It is incredibly useful, but it is tied to observations, and not facts (whatever those are).
If you want "truth" go study math. :)
Well, drugs get around it by charging enormous fees, and since life is at stake people are willing to pay them (grudgingly). I doubt people will pay as much for an ear of corn as they do for a bottle of Viagara.
Hey, I'm open to other options, but what you're proposing basically seems like a ban on modified foods. You can feed people all the toadstools you want, as long as they're natural, but heaven forbid you try to make a low-fat mayo that tastes good.
Which is why every so called 'fact' should be accompanied with a degree of probability, even if it's very rough.
Exactly - just look at how well that worked on Wall Street. Hey, that derivative has a 99.999999% chance of going up but 384%, and only a measly 0.000001% chance of losing 75%, so there is no chance that if we have 80 bazillion shares of 40,000 derivatives like this that we'll actually lose anything, right?
Or we could use the example of the space shuttle, which had a well-engineered set of parts that together only had a 1 in 10,000 chance of serious failure.
Numbers are only as good as the underlying model. Testing a model seems NP hard to me. The only way to know the shuttle failure rate is to launch it 100 times and see how many astronauts die. The only way to REALLY know the probability of the big bang being right is to create 10,000 model universes from the same (unknown) starting conditions as ours and see what conclusions the scientists who evolve in every one of them independently come up with.